Inter Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Personality ...

International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences
May 2012, Vol. 2, No. 5
ISSN: 2222-6990
contribute to success. These include intra-personal skills, inter-personal skills, adaptability,
stress managemant, and general mood (optimisim happiness).
In the recent year, the most appropriate method of measuring emotional intellgence is
currently an area of controversy. Because there are many conflicting emotional model, it is not
easy work to describe emotional intelligence, the proximal roots of which lie in the work of
Gardner, (1983), and more specifically in his concept of intrapersonal and interpersonal
intelligence (Mayer, Salavey & Caruso, 2004), Petrides, Frederickson & Furhnam, 2004). Based
on discussion above, emotional intelligence is characterised by some researchers as an ability,
involving the cognitive processing of emotional information, which is accordingly most
appropriately measured by performances test. An alternative proposal is that emotional
intelligence should be regarded as a dispositional tendency like personality which can be
assessed by self-report questionnaire.
Therefore, there has been an interesting interest in the theoritical development of the concept
of emotional intelligence in an attempt to identify wheather or not this newly introduced
concept accounts for variance not already accounted for by intelligence and/or personality (Fox
& Spector, 2000; Van der Zee et al, 2002) in various human transactions. Thus, it is not currently
clear if emotional intelligence actually assess the same constuct, and in this context Petrides
and Fruhnam (2001) have suggested the terminology ‘ability EI’ and ‘trait EI” to distinguish the
two measurement approaches. Ability EI or cognitive-emotional ability refers to one’s actual
ability to recognize, process and utilize emotion-laden information. Meanwhile trait EI refers to
self-perceptions concerning ones’ ability to recognize, process and utilize emotion-laden
information. Petrides and Furhnam (2003) further stated that ability and trait EI are different
construct, but that their theoretical domain may overlap.
Recent debates on EI have focused largely on whether trait EI measured by self- report tests
has predictive power over above traditional personality traits. The results of several studies
have indicated that trait EI might be a valid constuct in the prediction of life satisfaction,
somatic complaints, rumination and coping styles (Kluemper, 2008; Petrides, Pita & Kokkinaki,
2007). However, the ability of trait EI in an academic setting is still unclear (Tok & Morali, 2009;
Barchard, 2003). Consistent say that emotional intelligence as a construct has been showed to
be an independent construct from personality (Caruso, Mayer & Salovey, 2002; McCrae, 2000;
Zadal, 2004; Vakola, Tsaousis & Nikolauo, 2004; Shulman & Hemeenover, 2006). Those
researchers used an ability and trait measure of emotional intelligence and 16PF as personality
measure. However, Higgs (2001) found a positive correlation between emotional intelligence
and the function of Intuition, but not Feeling, in Myer-Briggs Type Indicator. This findings show
that the relationship between emotional intelligence and personality is still far from clear.
For the current study, the authors retained the original items for translation Malay Language.
The translation work was done to suit the scale for the student participants and more
importantly, for future use in the general local population. Therefore, the definition of
emotional intelligence is the same as adopted by Goleman (2001). The construct is
operationally defined as the score on the EI scale developed by Goleman (2001).
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